← Adarsh Pandit →

I’ve been wrestling with this for a while. My wife deactivated her account more than a year ago and found it refreshing.

I didn’t think I was going the same way. However, I realized a year ago how little I logged in and why.

Friends?

I looked at my feed and realized:

1. More than half of my ‘friends’ were acquaintainces
2. I had not contacted ~90% of my 'friends’ in the past year
3. The content most people posted was not very interesting to me.

Content

The last one is important. Even if I felt no close connection to the people posting, if the content was good, I’d probably still check it.

Most of it was strongly political, incredibly negative, or wildly inappropriate (family member passed, very personal medical info, etc).

Kids

Being in my (ahem) 30’s, most of my 'friends’ had kids, so my wall was a flood of pictures of children.

As a new dad, I get the desire to constantly share pictures of your kids. I also get the other side - it can be too much. I’ve had a number of friends have trouble starting a family and I get that perspective also.

Before our son was born, my wife and I agreed not to post pictures on Facebook. We set up a private password-protected Tumblr and share the link with friends and family. I like it because Tumblr (and Tweets/Instagrams) are all more 'opt-in’ to me - if people don’t want to see the content, they can unfollow me or stop checking the blog.

I recently read a post by someone who made Facebok palatable by unfollowing everyone but friends/family. I definitely could do it, but it doesn’t appeal to me.

The less I’ve used Facebook, the more they have sent me really needy, passive-aggressive emails to try to get me to log in. If they left me alone, I’d probably just de-friend everyone but my family. But that’s not how you run a business.

So today, for some reason I had enough and deactivated my account. I know all of the data will stay there in perpetuity, but at least the emails will stop (I hope).